The Room
by You Left Me At The Altar
Summary: Lawrence Gordon has been locked in his apartment, room 302, for five days, after having recurring nightmares. He enters a large hole in the wall of his bathroom and meets Adam Faulkner. In his dream...?
1. Room 302

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_**It was two years ago that Lawrence Gordon moved into Room 302 of South Ashfield Height, an apartment building in the medium – sized city of Ashfield. Lawrence was happy and enjoying his new life without his ex-wife Allison after the divorce.**_

But five days ago, something strange happened. He began to have a recurring dream each night. One other thing…

He couldn't leave Room 302… 


	2. Prisonic fairytale

_What's with this room?_

An apartment covered in what appeared to be blood and rust greeted him as he woke up. The air was heavy and bleak, reinforcing his procrastination in getting up. He had to eventually though, so he groaned and rolled over, forcing his aching limbs to stand.

He quickly observed the damage done to his room. When he had fallen asleep it was fine, but now it was…terrible. Just in his bedroom his red typewriter was missing, replaced by cobwebbed notebooks and disturbing graphic pictures.

_This room…is this really my room?_

A chilled bewilderment ran down his spine as he moved into the living room. His false hope shattered when the room turned out to be the same as if not worse than the horrific bedroom. The hairs on the back of his neck prickled as he passed the static blaring on the TV.

_What's this…? I thought I had a turn table here…_

His heart rate increased as he walked around the room. Observing everything didn't help it as he found that it was all new or replaced, rusted and bloody on top of that. Even the walls that were dripping with moldy fluids were decorated with odd paintings.

There was one framed in the corner, a picture of an unfamiliar man; slightly messy and scruffy but still somewhat refined. Aside from that he looked mostly uninteresting and gray. At least, compared to the picture to the left of it.

Where they were in the picture was unidentifiable, but it was clearly an unfriendly realm. He shivered and wished he could step back when he saw twenty-one bodies strewn about in a crazy but definite pattern, within pools of their own blood. The gore and condition of their bodies was a crime that could only be committed by a fellow man, making him retch. Passing the picture quickly only led him to freeze again.

_Creepy…it looks like a face._

It resembled one so much that he nearly cried out and fell backwards. He told himself it was just the bizarre rust on the wall and nothing else. Though he relaxed when he realized that the folds and wrinkles in the wallpaper only _looked_ like a face, he began to worry just a little bit more when his head began to burn with pain the longer he squinted at it. He prodded his temples gingerly with the pads of his fingers and shuffled into the compact kitchen.

A horrible, rotten smell infiltrated his nostrils, causing him to retch again. Tears sprung from his eyes, but he forced himself to keep them open to navigate his way around the counter. The stench was wafting directly from the fridge. He approached it, the smell worsening. It was like burning leather, rotting flesh, and gagging bile snaking its way about, deteriorating the atmosphere to its toxic taste. Too afraid to open it up, he stumbled into the front hallway of his (or what used to be his) apartment.

In a stupor, he just stood and stared as things began to form on the far wall. Cracks, small at first but rapidly growing before his eyes. Emerging and stretching from the plaster, it all seemed to center around the portrait of the twenty-one bodies. They deepened and spread, imitating the maw of a formless monster. His confusion turned to panic as the cracks spanned across the entire side of the room, the maw of the beast at its greatest size.

The panic soon morphed into a raw terror when oily spots began to drip from the wall out of nothing, carelessly painted into this realm. Before his very eyes fingers wriggled pointlessly away from the oily blackness, clawing and tearing at the wall. A sick groaning emitted from the hole as the strained hands pushed its body forward, beginning with a pasty head, thinly spread with sparse threads of hair. It wasn't mind-shattering until the face emerged, bulging, twitching, mouth yawning open in an infinite moan and eyes glowing yellow with hatred. Molten and burning, they were fixated on him.

He tried to run, but a sudden knife tore through his mind, searing through his brain and causing his knees to buckle underneath him. Watching him collapse, the haunted thing forced its tainted body into the ruined, rusty threshold. The pain in his head worsened until he swore his skull was slowly shattering, flaking away piece by piece.

The thing fell to the floor with an unnatural thud. Part of the ooze from the wall still followed the humanoid, acting as multiple umbilical tendrils until it broke away and began to drag itself across his floor, reaching, twitching, moaning for his flesh, his soul, his hope.

As if he was wearing cement clothes he remained completely paralyzed as the thing crept closer, seeping through the counter chairs as if they were merely air. He only moved when the pain in his head made him spasm, the…_ghost_ only inches away.

The pain in his head was blazing hot, but the heat was a blessing to him when the ghost's icy fingertips brushed against him, searching for a weakness in his skin. Dry ice entered his blood as the ghost's arm plunged into his heart, feeding off of his life.

–

Lawrence Gordon awoke in his pale, stuffy bedroom, eyes staring up at the rotating fan. His heart rate was racing to rival a horse derby and he was clawing at his comforter frantically, heels digging into the foot of the bed. They had grown more intense. They had grown too intense.

Nightmares that couldn't just be dreams.

He sat up, body filled with sand and spine creaking in protest. The past five days had been worse than hell for him, and the nightmares weren't included in that. Groaning he swung his feet over the side of the bed, gathering up enough courage to lift up his head to stare at the closet. He used to always wake up to stare at the window, but the outside that the windows led to now taunted him, and began to avoid them.

"Oh man…what a dream…," he murmured to himself, the only resident in the empty room.

Empty was the perfect way to describe his apartment home. The apartment was everything but empty, but to Lawrence it was the emptiest, saddest place in the world.

He stood up, picking up the phone to dial a number. In the beginning he had been specific in the numbers he called, but now he just mashed at the buttons with a number that sounded realistic, hoping to get a promising response. He didn't even care if he accidentally dialed a phone sex line; it was at least proof that he could contact someone or something about his predicament.

Lawrence set the receiver back down as the expected nothing blared back at him. No signal, no dial tone, only soft static he had to strain to hear. Just as he thought. He turned and began to walk out of his when he thought his ears would burst from that exact phone ringing its heart out.

Stopping with a short jolt, Lawrence turned on his heel and stared at the phone, wondering if it would keep ringing. When it did he picked it up, sitting on the bed for the lack of support his legs were giving him.

"Hello…?" he said a little sheepishly. Who the hell…?

A man with a high pitched voice spoke, ignoring his greeting and replying with words that sent a confused shiver down Lawrence's neck, "Help…me…,"

The phone jumped to a gurgling static before throwing a dial tone in his ear. Bewildered, Lawrence picked up the receiver as if it would fix the issue.

"What…?" he said into the phone, wondering if the man would come back. His mind started to work and he glanced down at the receiver gripped in his hand, noticing something crucial and ugly as it moved without resistance.

"The…cord's cut…!" he gasped. Setting the phone down quickly he moved away from it as if it was plagued and left the room. He desperately hoped that the rest of the day would go without any other hinderance. A quick glance in the refrigerator's direction ruined his wish though. White wine and chocolate milk was all that remained for him to consume.

Even still he cursed the contents of the fridge, turning to his front door. Saying that he was locked in was a deep understatement. Lawrence stared at the once operating slab of wood that stood between him and freedom. It was hard to see the door through the thicket of crossing chains and locks that barred his one escape route. The chains looked heavy and rough, the locks were even more so. A household wire cutter would not stand against these. Someone or something really wanted to keep him tucked inside this cage, so much so that they locked him from the insideout.

In the blank space just below the peephole red letters began to bleed and stain the white paint, seeping into the wood in the form of a blatant message. He had to shake his head to make sure he wasn't seeing things.

_Don't go out!_ _Lawrence_

Lawrence crept closer, hesitating. Cautious, he approached the door with care, barely skimming the chains as if they could burn him. He bent down, examining the many links to assure himself for the hundredth thousandth time that they were real.

His fingers twitched, just about to touch the chains when the sound of shattering glass rang just on the other side of the door. Lawrence inhaled sharply and jumped before straightening up to look through the peephole.

Adam Faulkner, his young neighbour, was crouched over outside his door. A paper bag nearly stuffed with alcohol bottles was pressed to the side by his arm, carefully held upright as he picked up fallen items. In an act of clumsiness he had dropped them on his way to room 303 next to him. He placed the last item into the bag on top of the others and stood up, staring at his door.

"Oh man…," he groaned, turning away to enter his apartment, "I hope my luck changes after work?…,"

He asked at herself in exasperation and moved out of sight. Lawrence had tried pounding and screaming before, and he knew it was to no avail. That never stopped him from trying whenever somebody wandered close, but he did not even attempt the smallest peep for help now. The reason why was because something else caught his eye and breath.

Bloody handprints were smeared in an obscenely compulsive order on the wall across from his room. Lawrence gaped as he stared, counting fifteen prints in all. Shuddering, he backed away from the peephole, nearly tripping on his incompetent heels. As if things weren't already turning him in the direction of insanity enough—if this day kept prodding at his head the way it was he'd be admitted to a straight jacket in no time.

Suddenly something exploded.

It was a sound he'd expect to hear when a superhero punches through a wall. Nothing shook but the blast was loud enough to be heard from the landlord's room on the first floor. There was the rocky sound of debris tumbling to a hard floor, then a spooked silence that echoed around—daring noise to be made.

Lawrence stared in fear in the direction of the bathroom where the noise had originated. He had been ruthlessly startled out of his skin, first by the sudden noise and second by the fact that he hadn't looked there when he had gotten up. Somebody could have been…

Survival instincts thrived in his nerves, and his usual avoidance of violence no longer mattered. He tensed, racing to think of a reachable, adequate weapon. The closest one was in the fridge, lying next to a bottle of chocolate milk.

Moving as stealthily as he could Lawrence opened the fridge, keeping his wary eyes toward his bathroom. He fumbled for the neck of the wine bottle, hands slipping and causing it to drop. His chest froze though his hand had been quick to catch the bottle before it shattered.

Nothing stirred in the bathroom, allowing Lawrence's confidence to carefully rebuild. He was shaking as he held the wine bottle, standing outside the door to the bathroom. He stood there for some time, trying to get himself to stop trembling. After several moments where nothing happened, Lawrence reached out and clutched the door knob. Taking a deep breath he pushed the door open as forcefully as he could, raising the wine bottle over his head in preparation to swing it.

The bathroom was deserted, but what Lawrence saw instead stopped him dead in his tracks. There, in the once drearily plain bathroom wall, was a dark, ominous hole. It was a little wider than Lawrence's shoulders and hung precariously between his sink and toilet just below chest level.

He lowered the wine bottle, keeping his firm grip on the neck as he ventured forward into the new, alien room. Someone or something had to have done this, and whatever it was couldn't have gone very far. His eyes flicked to the bathtub, expecting a face. Sniffing at himself dismissively, Lawrence turned away. Of course no one would be in the bathtub. Instead, they would (or should) logically be in the hole.

Lawrence approached it cautiously, wanting to look but afraid of the unknown.

He reached his hands forward to peek inside, hearing breathy, vaguely human noises from within.

"S-Somebody in there?" he called with a stutter, jerking backward. Standing up straight, a thought crossed his mind. Though the intruder may still be in there and dangerous he was willing to take the risk for his freedom.

"I wonder if I can get out this way…?"

Instead of leaving the pipe, Lawrence reached down and picked up the bottle to keep along with the pipe. It was clumsy and must've looked ridiculous, but he had a weapon in both hands now. As long as he felt somewhat safe, he could enter and face whatever sort of surprise was waiting for him. He drew in a long, somewhat steady breath and climbed into the hole.

Though he knew he was manually scraping through the craggy cement on his hands and knees, he still felt like he was being sucked in by a greater, greedy force. As he advanced through the hole his vision blurred and a blinding light burned the rest of it as he drew closer. Just before the light overwhelmed him Lawrence hesitated. The greedy force that seeped from the walls were pulling as hard as ever, and it had become clear that the light at the end of this tunnel was not one of those cliché ones where the protagonist breaks free of his confinement into sunlight at the end of the movie.

No. This light burned coldly. 

* * *

**Thanks to my wonderful Beta Lisa :) | HUH! Oh my gooooooooooooood.  
All I can say is that there's gonna be some "action" with Adam & Lawrence in the next chapter IF you review.**


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